


A Cure for the Lonely Heart

by sunfl0weryell0w



Category: Sekirei (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alien Biology, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Discussions of death, Do not repost, Drama, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, MBI's Advanced Medical Procedures, No beta we die like illiterates, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:08:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26408497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunfl0weryell0w/pseuds/sunfl0weryell0w
Summary: In which Sekirei zero-five Mutsu notices Hidaka Chiho first.
Relationships: Mutsu (Sekirei)/Hidaka Chiho
Kudos: 7





	A Cure for the Lonely Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Because there are no rules in quarantine.

He gets on the plane willingly, listening to the MBI secretary who explains the mechanics of the Sekirei Plan like he's reciting from a guidebook. It’s not like he has much of a choice; the alternatives are certain death or getting drugged and wake up disoriented in a parking lot in Japan’s new capital. Nothing about the escort from Guatemala is a courtesy; it’s a sobering demonstration that Minaka could have retrieved him any day during his years-long sabbatical.

Takami waits at the MBI airfield for Mutsu, looking older and more tired than he remembered her to be. It fills the drive to the generic underground labs – carbon copies of the facilities on Kamikura Island – and his following physical examination with an awkwardness her blustering professionalism can’t conceal.

“Couldn’t you have stopped it?” he asks when they are in the lift towards the surface, tucking away the credit card she said every Sekirei received.

“Minaka can’t be stopped when he wants something.”

“Derailed, then.”

“The jinki killed Takehito,” she says, excuse and explanation in one, and he leaves the ostentatious tower lobby without another word. Away from the shimmering presences of the little birds he fought so hard to protect. Siblings he will have to hurt in the cruelest of ways.

But zero-five Mutsu knows with the same certainty that once upon a time had him turn his back on his fellow soldiers that he is selfish enough to put his needs above those of the collective. He could have chosen his Ashikabi already, someone from outside of Japan, but MBI would have sent Karasuba, and she only spends the barest thoughts on rules and secrecy and international affairs.

So he stops on a building, the sky above him darkened with a blanket of clouds that blocks the wintery afternoon sun, and breathes. With time comes practice and experience. After twenty years he knows not only how to push and pull his power at the earth under his feet, but to feel for the vibrations of others. Spiritual sensitivity. Kazehana would have done the same, listened to her winds to find a soul that chimes in tune with her own.

There. A bone-deep loneliness that mirrors his own, the quiet yearning for companionship a hook behind his sternum that reels him towards an unknown destination.

A building, a hospital by the presence of many sickly lives, and there. A soul like a banked fire in a body that is fading.

The hospital garb leeches the color from her skin, mutes the splashes of color the cold winds forced on her cheeks. He descends from the sky amidst a flurry of snowflakes. To his surprise she doesn’t scream. Mutsu asks her why, and her smile is soft and warm.

“I see others like you around the hospital.” Then her eyes dim.

“They said I have two years left to live,” she whispers and tugs her coat closer, curling up in her wheelchair as snowflakes form a circlet on her hair. She looks so fragile, and it takes his breath away.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know. I feel like you won’t pity me.”

Her name is Hidaka Chiho. She wanted to see the world but now never will; no parents, and the house she grew up in had been sold years ago when she was first admitted to Hiyamakai Hospital. Chiho is small, thin as the virus siphons the energy from her body, barely slowed by powdery-white pills, red ones, blue ones. Too many.

She will die soon, but Mutsu has never before met somebody like her, filled with warmth and kindness when she has every right to curse her fate.

Hidaka Chiho is barely eighteen, so he follows his inner compass towards the familiar strength of the captain. The former goddess lives in a nice house, but there is an undercurrent of sadness around the property, something not even Matsu’s nervous energy can temper.

“I need a room,” he tells Miya, “I found who I was looking for.”

His sister – ruler – offers him a smile that reaches her eyes but doesn’t diminish her grief. “You can’t live with your Ashikabi? Is it her family that wouldn’t approve of a secret dalliance? Oh, how salacious.”

And he already wants to rescind his request. “She’s hospitalized.”

Miya’s teasing stops immediately; she offers him a room and three meals a day. Matsu steers clear of him after the first two days, but Mutsu wouldn’t want it any other way. He interacts with Homura, his immediately younger brother – no matter how he looked back on Kamikura Island – and that is enough socialization.

His priorities are elsewhere.

Like a clockwork Mutsu returns to Chiho’s hospital room, day after day as the winter grows colder, the days shorter. He tells her of the countries he visited, of cities like glittering jewels under the night sky, draws buildings hundreds of years old and gifts them to her. Pictures, time, snacks from the outside world.

It feels, he notes with amusement, like an olden-time courting; the knight who isn’t one and the frail princess trapped in a prison that isn’t one. Mutsu takes her out of the bland space that is her room to the park, and she can name every single bird they spot. He tells her to stay warm and gives her his scarf, and she sticks her cold hands in his.

Some days it’s hard to mask how much her presence affects him, and leaving the hospital is painful. But Kazehana’s ramblings about romance and love have found hold inside him sometime during their youth, and Mutsu decides his body’s needs are secondary when it comes to providing his intended with what she deserves during these days. Slow, and genuine, even if it means bringing up deeds he would rather forget, flaws he doesn’t like to admit.

Chiho’s gentle smiles never lose their warmth, and he is starstruck every time.

It comes to heed when a man clad in a black suit stops him in the hallway, flanked by Sekirei. He’s another Ashikabi, but his aura field is weak, nothing in comparison to the chain that tugs at Mutsu.

“Higa-sama would like to see you, zero-five.”

“I have better things to do,” he says, turns to walk away.

“You will come with us, if you want Hidaka-san to receive her medication.”

A cold hand grasps his insides, and Mutsu levels his glare at the sycophant. Projects his fury and willingness to crush to dust until the man takes a step back, and the Sekirei follow suit when they register the threat in his energy.

Their hasty retreat is a hollow victory. Chiho can’t stay, not when this Higa is part of the Sekirei Plan and has enough weight to delegate the dirty work. It aches that his presence endangers her already fragile health.

His feet carry him to the top of MBI tower, to where two scientists are arguing, always arguing. Takami’s face is pinched, and Mutsu can imagine why, but he doesn’t care. He found the one person he would do anything for, and he is selfish.

“Heal my Ashikabi and I will work for you again,” he says, but Minaka has been around Sekirei long enough to hear the plea in his demand. The man shows all his teeth when he grins.

“You have a deal.”

And with that everything Mutsu did to distance himself from MBI becomes nothing but ash in the wind.

Chiho’s warm eyes are huge when he enters her new room in the MBI-owned hospital, and the view from here is one where she could see the park on the other side of the street and the small birds that make her smile. Far from Hiyamakai and people who would kill her solely because of their association.

“What did you do?”

“I offered my service to them.”

“Why would you go this far for me? Even if you are my friend…”

“It’s not pity,” he says and drags the uncomfortable plastic chair to her bedside so they can talk eye to eye.

“MBI hatched us Sekirei for people, and my person is you. I’d do anything for another day with you.”

Chiho’s breath hitches, then she reaches out to him, and everything slots into place as the bond does. Suddenly his freedom is a small price to pay. Anything for her whispered confessions of love and devotion that make him feel able to re-shape the planet’s surface into anything she prefers, bring the cities she’d like to visit close enough to see from the hospital room.

MBI provides him with the new uniform, cut like his usual gear but with the same grey lines on black as the women’s version, the same haori that shows blood splatters so well. Armor of fear and darkness. His scarf the splotch of color that breaks the monochrome.

Mutsu stares into the mirror and hates himself.

Karasuba waits outside for him, a cruel smile slants her lips. Like him she hasn’t changed physically. Unlike him, who tried his hardest to piece himself together she had become a jagged-edged ghost of who she once was, filled with malice and pain and screaming at the injustice of her lonely existence. Unlike him she chose her Ashikabi because he would never give her his heart, just like she has nothing to give in return.

“And here we are, back together,” she croons, and no light is reflected in her eyes.

“I am not back. This is temporary.”

“Sure it is. The only ones who leave the Discipline Squad are those who die.”

He doesn’t want to agree, but he has seen Kazehana in passing, he lives with Matsu and Miya. Twelve years ago they were different people; it’s fitting, calling their old personalities dead and buried.

Mutsu would like nothing more than to do the same.

Karasuba takes him to see the other two Sekirei of the third-generation squad, and they are painfully young. It’s an unbalanced set-up, with the overlap in Benitsubasa and his powers. All of them melee fighters. But Karasuba tells him of orbital lasers, of human soldiers waiting in the wings, and that the two of them will deal with the saboteurs the competition sends regularly. As if that would assuage his disgust with MBI, with her, with himself.

The children he once fought to protect, killed to keep safe, now fall under his blade. It’s not death, he tells himself when he accompanies the battered Sekirei to the labs, his gaze focused inward on their dimmed souls. It’s for Chiho, he tells himself when the Ashikabi cry out for their loved ones as he smashes their bonds. It's the only way, he tells himself when he checks in on the terminated birds in their egg-shaped pods, curled up in torpor, before he heads out again.

If Matsu and Miya know they don’t address the topic, beyond the sorrowful looks of the latter when she thinks he won’t notice. It grates, but Mutsu is thankful that she lets him live under her roof. He couldn’t stay in the rooms in the tower, where Karasuba’s madness taints the air and the sleeping souls in the vaults under the earth feel like an accusation.

Winter turns into spring. He takes Chiho out of the tower to see the cherry blossoms, cradles her against his side to feed her sakuramochi, and the petals form a wreath on her brow. Every smile, every giggle is another reminder that everything he does happens for a reason, for her.

Because Takami is making promises and promises and yet his precious Ashikabi is fading, wasting away. The attack on the scientist is another setback, and Mutsu terminates two of Higa’s Sekirei in retaliation. Karasuba’s delight at his violence is pungent, to the point it makes him physically ill.

The appearance of Sahashi Minato at Izumo Inn, alongside a Sekirei that looks like Yume’s twin is another nail in the coffin of his sanity. Their sheer disregard of Minaka’s repercussions for breaking the secrecy clause, repercussions that manifest literally in Mutsu’s presence at the dinner table, regularly drive him to frustrated tirades.

Homura agrees with him, thankfully.

“He is so stupid,” his younger sibling bemoans once his self-proclaimed rival is away harassing the Ashikabi she shares with three others. Mutsu nods in agreement.

The only one with redeemable qualities is Kusano, because she is still young enough to be impressionable, and moderately even-tempered. He doesn’t mind baby-sitting. If his mind drifts off sometimes and slightly to the left, to a world where Chiho is healthy and Minaka was never allowed to install the Sekirei Plan, so be it.

“He has Matsu. Sahashi could filter out all unwinged in five minutes if he just dropped his pants in front of that pervert.”

Homura glares at him. “Don’t say stuff like that. If Takahito’s prediction is correct Sahashi is my Ashikabi too. I don’t want that mental picture.”

“My condolences,” says Mutsu then goes to bug Miya about snacks he can take to Chiho. Hospital food is not the best, and he loves the joy on her face when he can indulge her.

After the destruction that accompanied Tsukiumi's winging Mutsu thought he had seen the worst of what the Sahashi flock can achieve. When he wakes up to Kazehana in the house he knows the day is off on a bad start. It still doesn’t prepare him for Musubi loudly announcing her intention to smuggle a pair of Ashikabi and Sekirei out of the city, as if she doesn’t know he is chained to MBI’s service.

“You fools. Don’t force my hand by telling me more of your plan.”

Sahashi junior’s entourage levels varied looks of confusion at him, Kazehana’s eyes narrow with suspicion. He sighs and gets up to pack his things.

Mutsu never wanted to bother Chiho with any of this, but when he shows up late and she levels him with an unimpressed look the words tumble from his mouth like an avalanche. She doesn’t judge him – she never does.

“Minaka came by personally to tell me about the Sekirei Plan,” she tells him later, when he is curled up around her on the bed, mindful of the tubes in her body.

“I’m sorry you had to experience that.”

Chiho laughs at him, runs her fingers through his hair. Her wrists are thin, her skin translucent, and his stomach clenches in discomfort. Their time is limited.

“Will you stay with me?”

“Until death,” he promises, and receives a kiss as reward.

Of course, Sahashi then gets hospitalized and put into the room down the hall from Chiho. And his Sekirei, for all that they are sloppy with their exaggerated confidence, will notice his spiritual presence close by. It doesn’t even take an hour for the first one to corner him when he leaves.

“Did you tell MBI about the escape?” Tsukiumi demands to know, an infuriated hum in her voice. A challenge.

“No. That was all on you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why do you think Karasuba didn’t come after you?” he asks with deliberate calm. “She was busy sparring with me. Thought it was cute, psychopath that she is.”

“So why are you here? Come to gloat? Or to finish the job your fellow Discipline Sekirei could not?”

Her accusations lash at his skin, but Mutsu doesn’t take the bait. “None of your concern, if neither of you are capable of asking Matsu to do her job. She could have told you that MBI has working orbital cannons. Your friends are probably terminated by now.”

He isn’t sure if Tsukiumi is smart enough to ask Matsu regardless of what she thinks of him, but she stops hounding afterwards. Five days later they and Sahashi leave the facility.

It’s not as if his life returns to normal, not when he can’t set foot into the inn any longer. Mutsu has long made his peace with normal. The city appears to hold its breath in the days before Minaka announces they have entered the third stage of the Sekirei Plan.

He and Chiho watch on a tablet he liberated from MBI how a teenager in a period-accurate baroque get-up climbs around an abandoned construction site searching for a jinki, following his “big sister” who wears a white cotton bikini and trails veils and picks him up whenever he slips. If not for the parallel smackdown between Takehito’s old friend Seo Kaoru and a man who appears to be his long-lost little brother it could be an episode of _Takeshi’s Castle_. Flamboyant. Chiho laughs when he voices the thought, the sound dispelling the worry that Minaka will send the two of them out next.

But there are more jinki, and more battles. The Sekirei Plan will end soon, and yet it feels as if the bloodshed will continue forever.

Chiho is set for surgery, to replace several of her organs with cloned tissue treated with what Takami assured them were leukocytes capable of destroying the virus. Chiho is set for surgery, and Minaka’s teeth glinted, insanity in his blood-shot eyes, as he ordered Mutsu to fill the empty spot on Ichinomiya’s team during the third stage battle, and the only thing that might give him an edge is the vial with her blood that might trigger norito.

It’s pointless; he already surrendered his autonomy. It’s cruel; ordering him to fight the people he shared living space with and the Ashikabi to his former squad mates. It’s another demonstration of how completely Minaka owns the hundred and seven Sekirei that have survived until now.

Mutsu obeys, because Chiho’s eyes were alight with determination before they parted, and she made him promise to come back, her thin fingers tight around his.

The entire battle is a mess, from the moment Sahashi’s Musubi breaks the pillars carrying the half-finished highway to the point where Mutsu faces Homura, after terminating one of Higa’s Sekirei, and his sibling radiates betrayal. In the distance more and more little birds are cut down, their souls turning dim with loss.

He didn’t expect it, death’s icy fingers that pluck the string of light from his core. Mutsu staggers, claws at his chest, the warmth in his soul fades rapidly.

“Chiho?”

And then he’s gone.

…

…

…

Blinding light in his eyes, a high-pitched whine in his ears.

“Get up, zero-five. We have another invasion on our hands. You are needed on site.” Takami’s harsh voice cuts through the haze, demands Mutsu’s full attention.

“Understood,” he says and gets out of the pod. Why was he in there? He doesn’t know. Twelve years not in MBI custody might’ve taken a worse toll on his body than he expected, which explains an overnight stay in the medbay copied from the ship. So much for a Sekirei’s advanced immune system.

Something tugs in the back of his mind, a terrible migraine, but he soldiers on. It’s the only thing he knows how to do well.

He doesn’t know the city, but he knows how to take care of a threat.

He doesn’t remember the Ashikabi-Sekirei pair that comes up to him when the assault is over, and a voice in the back of his mind tells him that his last memory is from somewhere around November, but now it’s June? July?

Mutsu knows that he has forgotten something important.

He drifts around the city, follows his feet to a house in the northern part of the city, one that is filled with a strong Ashikabi, his weirdly concerned former squad mates and a catatonic Miya, and Sekirei he only remembers dimly but who apologize for an imaginary slight.

Three days, then his feet carry him to an MBI hospital, his fingers open the rooftop access, and he takes the lift down. Mutsu is bemused and curious in turn, right up until he stops at a door that feels painfully familiar; there are traces of his energy.

There is an unfamiliar woman in the room. He notices the thinness of her fingers and wrists, as if she had been sick for a long time. Pale, dark bruises under her tired eyes, but a smile that lights up the room. She is Ashikabi, and his chest aches with raw emptiness.

“Welcome back,” she says, and he closes the door without conscious thought. If possible her smile turns more radiant.

“They said I have a life to live now.”

“Why tell me this?”

Her smile dims, but there is an undercurrent of bubbling excitement around her, a yearning for companionship. He is curious. Her golden-brown eyes look at him with such affection and kindness that it steals his breath, and the sun that falls through the window forms a crown on her head.

“Because I know it won’t be much of a life without you.”

-.-

Bonus

Sahashi-sensei told her he wouldn’t remember. But he is here, back in the hospital room, and Chiho waited for nearly two weeks for Mutsu to come back. This has to count for something.

He sits down in his usual chair, and there is a crease in his brow that tells her how her words, his involuntary actions baffle him. Chiho scoots closer, unable to quell her impatience. She wants it back, that flow of conscious against her own that radiates love and worry in equal measure.

“You made my life so much brighter. Now that I’m cured I can give you something back. Would you consider me a second time?”

He blinks then takes the hand she offers him, careful as always. She wants him back so badly it hurts, and then, an age and three heartbeats later, he nods.

It’s gentle, soft, and she tears up when the light of his wings bursts in the room. He inhales, and something has changed in his eyes when he looks her over.

“You died, Chiho.”

“I did,” she admits, “for thirty seconds. I have two more sessions of treatment scheduled, and rehab. MBI is paying. Sahashi-sensei said it’s the least she could arrange for us.” She came back for him, just like he had always come back to her.

His eyes crinkle upwards, and Chiho feels relieved happiness bubble upwards in her chest as their fingers interlace and he leans his forehead against hers, relief and happiness and love curl around her like physical sensations. Her Sekirei is back.

She will never be lonely again.

-.-

**Author's Note:**

> In this universe Uzume is Mikogami Hayato’s first Sekirei. He gains a healthy respect for Sekirei and women in general, his probably-a-criminal big sister in particular, and a closet that fills with increasingly elaborate robes and cosplays.


End file.
